Monash receives Grand Challenges Explorations funding

23 May 2013

Monash University announced that it will receive Phase II funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables individuals worldwide to test bold ideas to address persistent health and development challenges. Dr Fasseli Coulibaly, from the Monash School of Biomedical Sciences,will continue to pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled MicroCubes as vaccines for the developing world.

“We have developed a new crystal-based vaccine carrier and we plan to establish whether these MicroCubes are a potent and ultra-stable way to deliver vaccines. If so, it would make it suitable for use in remote areas where adequate refrigeration facilities are not always available,” Dr Coulibaly said.

From 2009 to 2012 Dr Coulibaly was awarded two Phase I grants for theMicroCube program.Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) Phase I recognizes individuals worldwide who are taking innovative approaches to some of the world’s toughest and persistent global health and development challenges. GCE invests in the early stages of bold ideas that have real potential to solve the problems people in the developing world face every day. Phase II recognizes those ideas that have made significant progress toward implementation.

Dr Coulibaly’s project is one of four Phase II Grand Challenges Explorations grant awardees announced this week.

In previous Gates Foundation funded studies, Dr Coulibaly has engineered a vaccine where the HIV Gag protein has been embedded into these MicroCubes and showed that this vaccine stimulates strong immune responses in preclinical studies.

“To assess the suitability of MicroCubes as a generic vaccine platform, we will work on a flu vaccine and compare it to existing vaccines. Given the fantastic tools available for research on influenza virus, it will then be easy to translate preclinical studies to knowing what is going to happen in humans,” Dr Coulibaly said.

“Together with my collaborators Associate Professor Rosemary Ffrench and Professor Lorena Brown from the Burnet Institute and University of Melbourne, respectively, we’re hoping to establish in this Phase II project that MicroCubes have unique properties that also warrant their development as a vaccine vector targeting infectious diseases with the highest burden in developing countries: malaria, TB and HIV.”

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a US$100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 800 people in 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online application and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of US$100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to US$1 million.